re: Do you believe in free will?

Well I do not believe in a God so I believe all will is free

Admins deleted my thread of how much you've stole therefore I don't believe

i don't know, if you kill someone is that your free will or was it time for his free will to end?

God gave me the ability to make my own choices. I deal with the consequences. He also gave me a book with a heck of a lot of instructions on life and the ability to pray for tech support.

Im good with that deal.

quote:

---

I don't believe in free will. We have the illusion of choice, but it's all completely determined by our brain chemistry, our biology, and external stimuli.

---

I think people confuse free will and free choice. I certainly have free will. I don't always have free choice.

quote:

---

Like a million little crossroads
Through the back streets of youth
Each time we turn a new corner
A tiny moment of truth

For so many different connections
Our separate paths might have made
With every door that we opened
Every game we played

Somehow we find each other
Through all that masquerade
Somehow we found each other
Somehow we have stayed in a state of grace

I don't believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don't believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state

I don't believe in the stars or the planets
Or Angels watching from above
But I believe there's a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love and make it last

---

Rush - Ghost Of A Chance

quote:

---

Some other higher animals can reason but none of them, as far as we know, have the ability to empathize

---

quote:

---

Elephants most certainly do have the ability to do this

---

Are you relying upon the elephant's recognition of their skeletons as having been alive? While I think this indicates a high level of awareness, I don't think it's at the level of empathy.

Merriam-Webster defines empathy as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner."

I think elephants, dolphins and bonobos all have a high degree of self-awareness and emotions but I regard humans as the only animals that have the ability to imagine so abstractly that we can put ourselves "into the shoes of another," if you will. We have a brain that evolved this specific ability.